Noise

There is nothing the Crossmedia Ecologist hates more than a smug technocrat particularly when there is bite to their bark. So the Locative Urbanist sees our work as mere noise, a cacophony of competing ideas! We however see it as a smorgasbord an eclectic mix of possibilities, of pathways, of choices, stories of competing voices.

So the rules don’t always add up but it depends on which game ‘you’ are playing. To the rules you choose.

So we walk the city as protest. And this walk raises new questions for the city designers.

Should urban designers deliberately create better spaces for the exercise of democratic protest?
But surely the role of the protest is transform urban space to disrupt the hegemonic regime?
I do want to disrupt the commuter with my civic despair. What point a protest without appropriating the city, or perhaps conquering it but for a brief moment?

Contemplate Hausmanns’s famous redesign of Paris in 1852 – 1870 whose magnificent boulevards supported Napoleon III’s militaristic regime with the clearing of the narrow streets to provide streets wide enough for troops to march down and water cannons to be fired to suppress riots. In 1969 to the police used a bulldozer and the cover of a massive cloud of tear gas to move protesters who had felled trees across San Michel Boulevard – in France’s second most famous revolution against class discrimination.